Windows 8 the innocent looking new operating system of the Redmond
Giant, Microsoft, got updated from Consumer Preview to Release Preview
this week ahead of the scheduled date. The Notable changes include:-

New Metro apps

Starting
with some of the major changes, the engineering team has added a few
more native apps and a trio of Bing-powered apps: travel, sport and
news. This time they have unified the look of the app bar that drops
down from th etop of the screen. The options are app-specific, for
instance (favorite sports and trending news), but the look of the icons
remain the same.

Bing Travel

This
app integrates the most touted specialties of Bing, i.e trip planning.
You can easily book flights or hotels, or view certain destinations,
which you can pin to the start menu. The main page is a home to
selection of featured locales, along with a motley collections of
pictures, panoramas and travel articles. Once you bing into a specific
destination's page, you'll get more detailed info: everything from maps
to weather forecasts to even fare stats. While the only drawback of this
app which i felt was, the non-existent of the social sharing button.

Bing Sports

New
in the Release Preview is the Bing Sports hub, where we can follow our
favorite teams or digest the top stories across all athletics. On
launching, you'll be greeted by a top story, with other articles listed
over the right. Scroll far enough and you will find schedules, followed
by a self-explanatory area called "Favorite Team". Add in your favorite
team by clicking the plus sign. Although the basics: basketball, hockey,
baseball, various football leagues and golf have been covered, more
sports are expected to be added in the RTM version

Bing News

Similar
to the sports app, Bing News main page is crowded by a top story,
though on the right side top headlines in various categories are
present. Click on the app bar to view news by trends, or by source. The
media outlets, are broken down into various categories such as
technology,business etc. You

can even pin custom topics in the start menu.

Web Browsing

Tough
many of the changes account to stability improvements, the important
tweaks include the addition of the new Family safety features and
enriched privacy and security controls . This includes the addition of
Do Not Track capabilities being turned on by default in Internet
Explorer 10. The newest capability to be included is the "flip ahead"
which allows users the option to flip between pages with the swipe of a
finger, as well as a touch friendly Adobe Flash Player.

Mail

Thanks
to the stable update now upon launching rather than crashing, all the
in-boxes are listed separately on the left pane, this being a good
start. Despite not suffering a single crash yet, the app still doesn't
feel anywhere near as feature-rich as Outlook on the desktop. Although
being able to view threaded conversations would be a welcome upgrade.

Lock Screen

Microsoft
has rebooted the Lock screen which now offers a volume control button
even when the laptop or tablet is locked. Even better, is the
availability of pause or skip button.

Monitor Support

As
promised, the engineers at the Redmond have added the ability to drag
an app across the screen and on to an external monitor, no tweaks to the
settings needed. It's worth noting that both your PC screen and
external monitor will have four "hot corners," which means even if you
extend the desktop, there's no need to drag the cursor in order to pull
up the Charms bar. You can do that by moving to the right end of your
PC's screen.

Other
notable changes include the renaming of "More PC settings" to "Change
PC settings". Dig inside those menus and you'll find more color themes
to choose from. Navigating around is even smoother than before, and
fast. Booting up the laptop took around 15 seconds, about the same as
the Consumer Preview. However, resuming from sleep took under 2 seconds
about half of what it was in the previous version. Despite changing
settings, Windows 8 would lock itself after only one minute of idling,
an enormous bug hunt that Microsoft will have to do to get this ready
for the public.

The
Desktop has had its betta fish background removed, which encourages you
to choose your own desktop mode background. The lower left-corner Start
button has been shrunk, so it interferes with the traditional mouse
pointers less often. Harris explained that they are saving the New look
for Desktop mode for the final version of Windows 8

Wrap-Up

Release
Preview isn't the final look and feel of Windows 8, and is not the
final performance; there will be more colors for the Start screen, a new
desktop without the Aero Glass feature and the removal of lots of debug
codes which will improve the stability and performance of the OS. But
it does gives us a very good idea of the final version of the Windows 8
will be and it's robust and responsive enough for far more users to test
it.

The
significant improvements are in the Metro apps like Mail and calendar
which were basic and unreliable before. It's also great to see Microsoft
being bold enough to push the conversation on privacy forward by making
Do Not Track standard.